Digital lighting technologies, i.e. illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. Functional advantages and benefits of LEDs include high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, lower operating costs, and many others. Recent advances in LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications.
In lighting systems, such as those that include LED-based light sources, it is desirable to have efficient control over one or more light sources of the lighting system. For example, it may be desirable to control which of a plurality of the light sources are illuminated and/or to control one or more lighting parameters of one or more of the light sources. For example, it may be desirable to control color, color temperature, intensity, beam width, beam direction, illumination intensity, and/or other parameters of one or more of the light sources.
Direct specification during configuration of the one or more light sources enables specification of lighting parameters. However, direct specification may suffer from one or more drawbacks such as lack of ability to fine-tune applied lighting, lack of flexibility for adapting to newly-introduced environmental objects and/or relocation of existing objects, and/or lack of tailoring of lighting parameters and/or adjustments to specific objects. Control switches connected to a mains power supply also enable control of one or more light sources. However, such control switches may suffer from one or more drawbacks such as requiring connection to the mains power supply, which may pose constraints on where the control switches may be installed. Additionally and/or alternative drawbacks of direct specification, control switches, and/or other techniques may be presented.
Thus, there is a need in the art to provide methods and apparatus that enable control of one or more properties of light output and that optionally overcome one or more drawbacks of existing methods and/or apparatus.